I’ve been a journalist for over 20 years. I began as a feature writer on the UK’s Independent on Sunday newspaper and set up as a freelance in 2000. Since then, I’ve written for many of the UK’s national newspapers and magazines, from the Financial Times and the Guardian to Country Living and Cosmopolitan, and I’ve interviewed everyone from A-list celebrities, businesspeople, sportspeople and musicians to teachers and teenagers, farmers and fashion designers, cooks and criminals – plus many others. I’ve also recently been back to university to pick up a second degree in psychology, because the human mind fascinates me. Everyone has an interesting story to tell if it’s presented well and that’s what I like to do.

8 Tips For Managing A Portfolio Career

We hear a lot about portfolio careers these days: careers that combine multiple strands rather than the traditional full-time job. Fred Deakin’s portfolio is perhaps more extensive than most. He currently runs the collaborative organisation Fred & Company, which specialises in interactive art projects, teaches on the MA Communication Design course at the prestigious St Martins College of Art and Design in London, and is professor of interactive design at the University of the Arts London. With Nick Franglen, as the band Lemon Jelly, he has been nominated for the Mercury and Brit music prizes, made three albums and sold over half a million, and headlined festivals including Glastonbury and Bestival. Prior to that he was founder and director of the successful Airside design agency, which racked up awards from D&AD and Design Week to BAFTAs, and closed on a high in 2012 to allow the founders to concentrate on other projects. Alongside that, he’s spoken or performed at the Design Museum, Barbican, LCC, Design Indaba and Pictoplasma, run animation workshops at the Victoria & Albert Museum, delivered an Indonesian lecture tour for the British Council … if you want to know more – and there is plenty more – click here to look at his website. (I suggested to him that he was a modern-day Renaissance Man and he laughed and said thanks, but no, he really wasn’t. I still think it’s a fair description.)

So: how do you manage a portfolio career, making all the strands successful and keeping all the balls in the air?

Fred Deakin – difficult to describe in just a couple of words

Treat the first part of your career as research time – and fly lots of missions

“After I graduated back in the early 90s I got one piece of very good advice which I really took to heart: fly lots of missions. Like most young people I knew very well what I didn’t want to do, but I didn’t know what I did want to do. The first chunk of your career, you should be in research mode. You have this amazing freedom. I teach a lot of 20-somethings and I want to say: don’t be in a rush, don’t decide until you’re in your 30s. The difficult thing for young people is working out how to turn what they love into a living. What you need to do is commit to a bunch of interesting projects and consider that a research phase. I have a particular skill set but I apply those skills to a lot of projects. I’m a self-starter, very DIY. I think my post-punk generation is very much like that: do what you want to do, take it out there, get it started. Being professor of interactive design at UAL [University of the Arts London – he took the post up early in 2014] is actually the first ‘job’ I’ve had in a very long time. Earlier on, ‘jobs’ I’ve had have been the least successful part of my career; the parts that have been successful have been the ones based on vision from me and my friends, where I’ve been able to explore and play.”

Don’t be afraid to change direction

“I started doing an MA in artificial intelligence at Edinburgh University and realised I didn’t really have the discipline for coding, so I changed to an MA in English literature – I did my dissertation on Philip K Dick, bringing the course round to reflect my interests. I ran various Edinburgh club nights while I was at university and discovered my design and visual communications skills, found that I could create brands and communicate to an audience in a way that was quite instinctive – I was passionate about that scene, wanted to be part of it. Then I started a design company in Edinburgh, which crashed and burned very quickly, so I went to Central Saint Martins to do an MA in communication design. They very kindly let me in even though I didn’t have an art degree and my portfolio was entirely composed of club flyers and a fanzine I’d started – and I immediately knew I’d found the right place. I emerged with the confidence to think I wasn’t missing some kind of magic password that would let me into the creative industries. Then I really started exploring turning my creativity into my career. I loved doing clubs but I didn’t want to make my whole life out of it – you don’t see many 50-year-old club promoters and even fewer 50-year-old clubgoers. I learned a lot from the clubs: I ran a couple that were good, then one I was completely in love with, did some interesting stuff, really pushed the envelope – then realised it had its own lifespan, which ended. At the peak of your success, you say ‘It’s the last night.’ People say ‘No!’ and talk about it for years after – rather than ending up saying ‘Oh, is that still going?’ while you play to half-empty houses. I realised it’s far better to leave people wanting more: I was taught that quite brutally by the market and we all have to come to terms with it.”

Be prepared to collaborate

“I think a lot of MAs in arts education aren’t about doing, they’re more research-based, which is one of the reasons I wanted to step more actively into academia. Having been a tutor on and off since I graduated, and been a student myself, I’ve felt the lack of learning by doing. One of the problems I have at the moment is that students aren’t taught to work in a collaborative space. I learned everything on the job, working with other people. Collaboration is more important than ever, cross-discipline collaboration in particular. While I was running the clubs, I set myself up as a freelance and tried to do my own thing as a graphic designer, but then I thought ‘It’s all very well being a gun for hire, I like working with people.’ So I found a couple of mates, a space, and we started our own thing. We came up with a name, Airside, and it all started to take off. It was the same spirit as the club thing: the sense that, if we all came together, we would be greater than the sum of our parts. It evolved fairly quickly – we could smell that it was a good thing to get together. We had a big studio space that we rented cheap and we had our friends come in with their own little businesses. We’d all pretend to work for each other if a client came in – we’d bring each other cups of tea and say things like ‘The portfolio will be ready on Thursday, sir!’ Then we started hiring and growing.”

Diversify – and look for synergy

“It was the start of the internet and the fact that we knew how to build a website was a novelty – that skill meant we had a lot of work. We could communicate in a fun, bright way that was different to the grungy, dark graphic design of the time. At the same time, I was starting a band – I wanted to get more DJ work. All the other DJs were making records so I found Nick Franglen, we started Lemon Jelly, made a record we were proud of, pressed up 1,000 copies and people started getting interested. Airside started to play with Lemon Jelly’s visual language – it was a synergistic relationship. It was a time of change but it feels as though there’s a similar shift happening now, albeit in a recession context. We used to go to companies and say ‘If you want impact on the internet, give us a reasonable sum of money and we’ll do this for you.’ People would say ‘You’re mad! That costs the same as a double-page spread in a newspaper.’ Now the idea of having a web presence for that kind of money would be mad. There are still many waves to be ridden, if you can walk into someone’s office with something people will be wanting in three months’ time: it’s an old cliché but recessions are the times of the most creativity.”

Grab unexpected opportunities

“When I was at St Martins I was still DJing and there was a tutor who had a birthday party – she asked me to DJ, I did, and the party was great. Six months later, I graduated, I met her and she said ‘Great to see you – do you fancy coming and teaching?’ – and that’s how I got my first teaching job. It was a lovely instance of karma. I did one day a week and to start with it was terrifying, but it was a good space to get into. There’s no doubt in my mind that the UK’s creative industry is the best in the world and the main reason for that dominance is that our art schools are great: they acknowledge the place of rebellion and independence within academia. That anarchic, irreverent sprit is possibly what’s required to make sure young people coming through now continue to have that level of excellence that has made us the world centre of creativity. It’s a challenge I’m excited to be part of.”

Don’t always chase the money

“Whenever I’ve done a project and money has been the number one reason, it has always turned out to be an awful experience – and most of the time, the money evaporates and runs away and it turns out to be an average-earning job too. Some projects I’ve initiated myself and pulled up by their bootstraps, or done for small amounts, have ended up being very successful – not only creatively and emotionally rewarding but financially rewarding. That was one of the principles of Airside: if people are having a good time and producing good work, that is actually a business model, because great work will be noticed, desired and rewarded. I’m not driven by money but I’m driven by excellence. Choosing projects is down to gut instinct a lot of the time. It’s definitely about chemistry – there’s work I know isn’t for me when it drops into my inbox, and I go on a lot of ‘dates’, have a lot of coffees – and take a while to commit. If there’s a crossover that’s good for both parties, that’s the moment to say yes. I’m most into interaction: I use music and visuals and ideas and that’s the kind of stuff that I mould. It’s about taking the audience out of the norm – there’s a lot of playfulness in what I do. I like joy. The goal is some kind of Christmas moment where people feel they’ve stepped out of their everyday lives.”

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